News from the future?

For a very short time earlier this evening (Tuesday evening, sometime before 22:00 CET that is), our newspaper De Telegraaf reported that Sweden has dropped charges against Julian Assange. The article was on the site for at least a few minutes minutes before disappearing again, and all someone mailed me was a screenshot of the link from the front page to the article. So what we have is the headline “Sweden drops charges Assange”, the sentence “The house-arrest of wikileaks-boss Julian Assange has been terminated, now that Sweden is no longer requesting his extradition.” and the fact that it was on there for a few minutes so it could get 5 reactions. By the time someone made this screenshot, the article itself was already 404 not found.

Now it’s going to be interesting to see if this is an accurate description of events that have, at least apparently, not yet taken place. And if so, the interesting question is how and why, of all the world, exactly the Dutch newspaper that has been exaggerating my relationship with Wikileaks seems to have this direct line to the future.

Update: Never mind. Probably nothing. De Telegraaf just not checking the facts: this was apparently a short hoax on twitter this afternoon, a media-echo of earlier events. See the comments…

Someone twittered this earlier today, he found an old article from august or so. After that de Swedes charged Assange again of course. The tweet retracted within 5 minutes.
We can conclude that De Telegraaf reads Twitter and is, not surprisingly, as dilligent as ever checking their facts.

Sorry for the English guys. It’s 2:35, around this time of the day my Dutch is a little bit better. I said nothing more than that I saw a tweet of the same fact passing by on twitter & ‘The Telegraaf’ could have reported that ‘fact’ as new. Even though it was a couple of weeks old.

I considered this explanation (‘media echo’) without knowing about the tweet, but then this seemed so oddly specific with this fact that this house arrest is cancelled because that’s obviously not an echo.

But the fact that this was on twitter this afternoon makes the media-echo theory more likely.

I am sure De Telegraaf made the conclusion of lifting the house arrest all by themselves. 🙂
But we must give them some credit: they were very quick in taking it off their website. I suppose one of the now deleted comments was: idiots! this happened 6 months ago!
I expect any moment now they will retract their story about you, in wich you were running around arab nations supporting terrorism at the ripe age of 10….